


Fallow

by plsnskanks (orphan_account)



Category: Eddsworld - All Media Types
Genre: M/M, katya is in this for like .4 secs so not tagging
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-17
Updated: 2019-02-17
Packaged: 2019-10-30 02:44:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17820290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/plsnskanks
Summary: Tord and Tom on some angsty bullshit: Longfic edition. Inspired by Moho's sugardaddy au but not too strongly.





	Fallow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [moho](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=moho).



"It is okay," Tom says, voice deceptively calm. "Just say it, say it, Tord. You took a person at their most vulnerable and used them to numb your own pain." His voice grew to a soft, high whisper, "Just say it."

Tord doesn't really know what happened to Tom. The salamander in his hand turned into a snake, and the venom is dripping at the edge of his wrist.

“Admit that at the start of all your grand plans, you never calculated the human cost, and now that you stand on the edge with real blood on your hands, you don’t have the guts.” The last phrase comes out so tenderly, a lover’s whisper and that’s what Tom is, right? Was? His lover?

Tord looks at the man who laid splayed under him, fragile as glass, open, quivering, vulnerable. He had felt on top of the world then. The power of having someone fully within his grasp. 

“And now that you know, you don’t have the strength within you to cope.”

Tord blinks at him.

“Go. Home.”

\---

He frankly loses it.

He loses it and he is just gone emotionally, mentally, physically. Tom is just gone. In his place is a monster and the monster screams with a voice that although inhuman in its rage and ferocity, very much belongs to him.

As much as Tom has always liked telling himself the monster is something set apart from him, that it’s not really who he is, that it doesn’t belong to him, an entirely different entity that is a parasite on his conscious.

It is wholly and irrevocably him.  
But! The voice in his head cries. You had no choice! You didn’t choose to be experimented on. You didn’t ask for this.

Yeah. He didn’t.

But they were here weren’t they? Distantly Tom can see that the smashed car in his grip is being thrown down towards those soldiers. Distantly he can feel the coursing anger and rage. Distantly he can understand the weight and the toll and the gravity of his actions.

But it’s so distant he’d rather sit passenger side than wrestle with the beast to get center seat.

He is shot. He isn’t sure with what. They shoot him full of basically everything during these events. Bullets, shrapnel, needles full of odd compounds. One of those ones set all his senses on fire so much so that he ripped the front face off of an office building and came back to himself laying in the street amongst the debris with rectangles of paper softly floating down around him like falling snow.

Tord’s defenses had backed off for that day.

Today though. He doesn’t like the tint to the air. He doesn’t trust the way his senses feel on edge, screeching and screaming at every odd input.

He feels another pinch and it occurs to him that he doesn’t feel… he doesn’t feel present to himself. More so than usual. If before he was in the passenger seat, now he is in the back seat slowly dissolving through it into the trunk.

He tries to lunge out distantly at what are now foggy specters in a rapidly fading point of view. The world around him becomes a smoke screen, a phantasm as he feels himself accelerating spatially in some direction, but he can’t put his finger on which direction exactly that would be. He hits something and its just a reality. It doesn’t hurt. 

He is so far from the passenger seat now he’s sitting on the road and the car is whizzing away from him and he can’t even feel sad. It’s just a reality. He looks out behind him, away from the dusty wake of the car and sees a looming wall of black rushing in like the unceasing tide to eat up the black road and everything on it.

And with that, he’s gone.

Unconsciousness is eerie like that. He’s learned to get used to it, especially since the experiments. Days, weeks, months swallowed up with him barely noticing only to be pointed out by the calendar date being a few numbers off than what he anticipated.

“Hey.”

He is waking up in the dirty street, he can feel its hard press against his cheek and he puts a hand on the table to lift himself up. Or tries to.

He cracks his eyes open only to find the expected reality of a grimy street to morph into that of the current spotless hospital room. He thinks he is in a hospital. Maybe he is back in the test facilities.

“Hey,” he hears the voice again. It’s his voice. It sounds hoarse and ugly and distantly he can hear something rushing like water in his ears and he feels a hot rash course through his body.

“Hey where am I?” He calls out. No response. He tries to jerk his arm. He hears a metal clink and looks up to realize it’s attached to the bed. He tries, for an immeasurable amount of time, to wrest his hand free from the cuff. He twists and turns it before his hand starts to get raw and chafed and even tries a bit past that. He stops when he starts to bleed a bit.

Right. 

He then just sits. Sits and mediates. Pulls every bit of energy within himself and focuses on trying to shift. Shifts are weird for him. He gets them sporadically and they’re hard to predict but he has, once or twice, found the rare voluntary trigger though doing what he is doing now. 

No dice. He notes he has an iv in his arm. He thinks about pulling it out but decides he would rather not. Looking down to examine himself he’s covered in bruises and cuts and looks pretty unhealthy and malnourished just from the looks of his calves alone.

When did he last eat? Or have a decent shower for that matter. After whatever immeasurable streak of time the door opens and in comes, well, something.

He never saw Tord after their last tiff. So he can’t say he immediately recognizes the drawn, tight face, half of it singed off, the other with lines in it set so deep he initially guess the man’s age at forties or fifties. Guess trauma and traumatic injury does that to you.

“Ah, you’re awake.”

Tom just looks at him. The voice is the same as ever, cool, collected, manicured but underneath he knows there’s something more to it. Some unstated emotion that hasn’t yet manifested into a concrete form but he is aware it’s there and waiting, like the unsettling presence of a hole in the ground. He isn’t sure what’s in it, for all he knows nothing is, but he would rather not go putting his arm down it either way.

“You’re awake and verbose as ever, excellent,” Tord says and oh, that’s a puff of mild annoyance. Tom wonders what it would take to tease that into a full-blown fury.

“I came here to make you aware of your situation. I could offer you a choice, but it would be a false one and I respect your intelligence enough not to do that.” Tord tugs on his sleeve, smoothing out a wrinkle and Tom notes the metal hand he seems to be pulling it over.

Ah. So the scarring was a bit more than just cosmetic. Interesting.

“You are to be under my jurisdiction, doing whatever odd job I can find for you. Whether that is cleaning the army outhouses or paper pushing is down to your behavior. I know you, and I know you’ve spent the past four months being a little hellion for your own amusement. That ends here.”

Tom meets his eyes solemnly. His grey eyes seem to have this fire, this light, this force, they didn’t contain a moment ago. They seem to spark and the fire kindles greater as Tom stares him down.

“Does it?” He hears his own voice say.

A smile breaks across Tord’s face, showing his sharp canines prominently, “It does.”

“Good,” Tom says it and he finds something welling up within him, he can feel himself as himself, here, now, present, “I’ll hold you to that promise.” Tord looks at him a bit longer.

“It’s nice to see they were able to bring you here in one piece, you certainly didn’t make it easy.”  
“If I made it easy, would you be standing there looking so smug?” He countered. Tord’s smile widens into a positively carnal grin. It looks like his mouth wants to devour the rest of his face.

“I’ll see you when you’re fit enough to do more than lay in a bed,” and before Tom can respond he is gone. Out the door. 

He tries centering himself again. Tries to find that one… little… push. That could break him through to having all that unleashed potential, all that blind fury, rage, energy. But he can’t. He gives up when he can feel himself genuinely starting to fall asleep. 

He knows the reality is he had his foot half in the grave and the only thing that drug him out was Tord being unable to resist picking at him the way a child would an insect. Tom sucks in a calming breath and tries to bring himself into his full mental faculties.

He is going to stop whatever it was he has been doing. The blind emotional tantrums. Those aren’t getting him anywhere. Well. They are but it’s just further into the pit he has been digging for himself. He wants out, he realizes.

What he wants, most of all right now, is to be wherever Edd and Matt are doing whatever they are doing. That’s what he wants. He could say he wants to upend whatever little tinkertoy soldier game Tord is playing but to be honest? The lines in Tord’s face as he entered the room just told him he was in the process of burning himself out.

No. Tom wants to use Tord to get him up and out of this shit. He wants the shifts to stop, he wants the blinding rage to stop, he wants his normal everyday mediocre life back.

Tom sleeps. They bring him food, he eats. He does what he has to do and in time he sees the bruises fade, his skin tone stops looking so sallow against the harsh fluorescent light and before he knows it he is standing on shaky legs, uncuffed, only to sag violently down towards the floor as he is hit with a wave of vertigo and his legs buckle underneath him.

The nurse catches him.

“Easy there, it’s been a bit, give yourself a moment to adjust,” She says as she works to ease him into a sitting position on the bed.

“Thank you,” he says and she smiles at him. She has a kind face and he wonders what life choices she made to end up in a place like this. Serving a cause like Tord. He is too tired to go down that particular rat hole so he wipes the slate of his mind and opts to save it to be one of those late night questions that keeps him up.

She holds his arm around her shoulder as he takes a few faltering steps and after a bit they have him walking upright and on his own, relatively steadily.

He thanks her and she motions for him to follow her.

It is an eerie feeling walking out of a room into a hallway he knows he must have traversed at some point but doesn’t remember. He feels the cool hospital floor under his feet and the soft draft of air from the hall and he is reminded of the paper-thin vulnerability of his hospital gown.

She continues walking and Tom finds himself following. He’d like to think he trusts her enough not to lead him somewhere dangerous, and in truth, he trusts her to think she is leading him somewhere safe and advantageous for his health, just as much as he trusts Tord to take advantage of someone’s naivety like that.

They arrive outside a solid set of double doors, ornately carved and almost prestigious looking if it wasn’t for the fact they look brand new and unbattle-tested. She knocks and the sound is hollow.

The doors open on either side and they step through to see a desk in similar shape and form as the doors, Tord sitting perched behind it and it is starting to get to Tom how much he seems to like posturing behind grand sweeping symbols without much backing.

“Nice to see you again Tom,” Tord says, light smirk on his face.

“Wish I could say the same,” Tom said and really, the sight of his face is unsettling but after a while the effect lessens.

Tord’s smile falters a bit but he recovers as his eyelids lower.

“Why don’t you go get your uniform on? I believe I had something arranged that would suit your tastes,” Tord leans back in his chair as a soldier comes up to him and hands him a pair of folded clothes.

Tom looks at it and looks at Tord incredulously.

“Out the hall a few doors down is a space where you can change,” Tord said, and Tom turns and goes. He finds the clothes fits him near perfectly and it should perturb him but he opts not to put much thought back into it and instead returns to Tord.

“Ah there we are, good to see the measurements were accurate. For the moment you’ll stay with me through meetings recording the events and taking notes while I brief. After that, who knows, I’ll find ways to keep you busy,” Tord says and while his face can’t exactly convey all the expressions it’s undercooked form could, he gets the idea Tord would be leering at him if he could.

Tom gives a lazy salute with his middle finger.

That’s how it starts. Seems basic enough. If Tord is dumb enough to let him hone knifes to stick in his back later, well, who is Tom to argue with that?

He starts collecting intel. Ripping out pages here and there with notes of the core details. Enemy movements and all that. More interestingly, he starts to notice things about Tord. 

Starts noticing his nervous ticks before meetings, the way he tugs down on his sleeve to cover his hand at times or blatantly puts it forward as a show of power. Notes the way he sometimes traces the scars on one side of his face as if he is forever intrigued by their unnatural presence.

Under his cool, collected façade, he is wound tight like a spring and on occasion he loses his grip and the coil comes loose violently.

What a sight that is.

“So you thought that, underarmed, and without relaying any information to hq, that you could undertake a Green Army patrol by your lonesome?” Tord was barking into some fresh meat’s face. When Tord was angry his face took on this near Halloween quality. You could easily make a latex copy of his fearsome scowl and sell it for all the kiddies to wear.

Tom smirks at the thought and as Tord is turning away in disgust he catches sight of that smirk. An odd look crosses his face and he dismisses the scolded soldier without looking back at them. He waits to hear the door shut and then it is him and Tom alone together.

It’s weird, admittedly. Over the past couple weeks he had spent nearly every waking moment with Tord, being carted around, allowed meal and bathroom breaks in sparse intervals before they were off at a brisk walk or ride to some other part of the base or an alternative base entirely.

Despite their proximity to each other they hadn’t really had much time to be alone together. And well. Here they were.

“So, you think this sort of thing is amusing?” Tord asked him coolly. 

“I think you’re reactions are amusing, not necessarily the context behind them,” Tom replied in a detached tone of voice, and he is finding part of himself wanting to press away from Tord and the other part wanting to push him of some perceivable edge. He wants to see the cracks and lick them over with his bare tongue.

“Is that so?” Tord says and there he is, moving closer. He is into Tom’s space now, he can feel the heat of his breath, notice the intricate weaving of his eyepatch, the dainty sweep of his lashes on his remaining eye.

Tord is very human, despite the disfigurement. Isn’t that a relief? Tom doesn’t like that he feels it but he feels a part of his spine tingle and his entire being feels like jelly slowly melting down in the heat, dissolving into the very chair upon which he now sits.

Tord is not only human, he is a human he has come to understand. His anger, though violent and sometimes terrible in its ferocity and unreasonableness, is predictable and sometimes he even finds himself empathizing with him.

And after the long cold of being alone with himself, struggling to make it out of the deadlock between his perception and an ailing and maligned reality. 

Well. He is not exactly adverse to warmth in any form. Even if it’s scalding. Tord can immolate him anyway he likes.

“I like seeing that you have a pulse,” he remarks. “Behind that wax face of yours.”

Tord blinks at him and a slow smile creeps across his face, “I could say about the same for you, but you don’t even give me that. You emote as much as my desk. That smug look you had a few moments ago is the most I’ve seen you express all month.”

“Would you like to change that?”

Tord looks like he would, but then a knock on the door sounds and it occurs to him that it is a meeting room they are attempting to conduct after hours business with and they both rise to their feet and clear out, letting the next briefing begin.

For the rest of the day, the tension between them is palpable. Whatever Tord is doing, his eyes seem to drift over to Tom and hone in on him to the point where he feels like he is the only one in the room, unclothed and laid open.

Then he snaps back into the fact that his job is to take notes and his pad is so far empty bar the beginning word “Tord”.

That is perhaps the first time Tord notes that his assistant looks flustered and the realization makes him pause a bit longer than usual as he watches Tom fumble for his pen. They get through the meeting. And really, get through is an apt description, because it’s more of a chore than it usually is for either of them.

Tom can’t help the fact his head feels like it’s rapidly clouding full of thoughts that are empty in content yet occupy a space in his brain. The effect is that he has only a few pages of shaky, vague notes to show to Tord after the meeting.

He doesn’t usually ask to see his notes and Tom would normally petulantly tell him if he doesn’t like his notetaking skills he is welcome to write his own goddamn notes. But he doesn’t. Instead he mumbles some sort of apology and takes the pad back from Tord and their hands touch and Tord holds onto the pad a bit long and the connection between them drags out and-

Isn’t this train of thought spiraling into nowhere?

“Hey, we’re done for today,” Tord says. And wow, look at the time, they are. Tom jerks back his hand and tries to quell the rush of self-loathing that washes through him at the realization that he is getting close, far too close to Tord for comfort.

And there’s no backing down now. As the weeks progress the touches of hands get more and more common, the close talks and stage whispers and little asides that is just the two of them in some alcove of the base get more frequent. Tom finds himself being huddled into tight areas with Tord in his personal space looking at him intently, expectantly, and its with a cold wash of surprise that Tom realizes Tord is starting to trust him.

Oh. Oh isn’t this too good not to exploit. 

So maybe Tom starts to respond a little in kind, soft touches, laughing and emoting a bit more freely. He lets his walls drop and allows himself to become a bit more natural around Tord as they progress through meetings and planning and Tom finds himself becoming something of Tord’s right hand man.

It escalates to a fine head when there is a breach in base security. The deceased was later discovered to be a double agent. 

Tom doesn’t like her the moment she appears. She seems to come up from nowhere, climbing, or rather sleazing her way up the lower rungs and appearing in the briefing meetings a practical barnacle at Tord’s side and a thorn in Tom’s. 

Tom looks her over with her pale blonde hair tied into a neat little ponytail and her ice blue eyes. Looks at the way she wraps her arm around Tord’s bicep and pushes herself bodily against him whenever he seems lackluster in delivering attention.

Tom hates to admit it incenses him, but it does. Especially because he feels as if Tord is just doing all this to make him. To make him what. Dawning horror encroaches on Tom as he realizes that he has a bit more (a whole meteoric fuckload) skin in the game than he ever intended to have.

So he finds himself stooping down to the petty lows of trying to vie for Tord’s undivided attention. He even hip checks her out of the way when Tord’s back is turned. Does he intend to start a cat fight? No. Is that what he gets?

He gets her nails digging into the meat of his lower back in order to get him to move out of the way, her bumping papers of a classified nature out of his hands and having them spill haphazardly in the hall. He gets a variety of things, most especially a cat fight.

But the climax, and isn’t that an apt word for it, is when this whole charade blows up drastically in his face once he catches his enemy of the month dialing out on an unregistered phone and delivering coordinates to an unnamed source. 

He reports her.

Maybe it isn’t his proudest moment. Because the rational, calm, logical part of him likes to say she was just a casualty on his side, a gambit for a larger win in gaining Tord’s favor. But the honest and less logical side of him tells him he did it not because he had any real opinion about her as a person but merely because she was in the way of him and Tord’s affections and the easiest way to rectify that was to sabotage his cause.

Tom doesn’t like that answer. He decides that isn’t the answer because when the time comes he is most certainly going to throw away all these unchecked affections he has towards Tord, and he is going to have things under control and Edd will swoop in and clean up the mess.

That is what he tells himself. He tells himself that as Tord calls him up to his office to privately congratulate him on his dedicated service. Tom finds the private part to be exceedingly and unexpectedly literal. Not even his second in commands are in the room.

“Well, I’ll admit,” Tord says as he moves round the desk and draws closer to Tom. “I didn’t expect such a flagrant display of loyalty, much less so soon after the sour note of our first encounter. Color me impressed.”

“I’m merely doing my job,” Tom said desperately trying to lock down his emotions and scrub any hint of need or want from his voice. The thing he fears most to betray him is his own crumbling self-restraint.

“And you’re doing it well,” Tord says and the distance between them gets even shorter. Tom finds himself scrambling for words to build up some sort of wall against the impending onslaught but he knows Tord has him right about where he wants him and he has no clue how to find an outlet or diversion.

So he freezes and lets the gap close. His indecisiveness will be the death of him. Tord is standing virtually nose to nose with him. Well alright. They have a bit more space than that but to Tom it feels like the walls of the room are pressing in around him and sooner or later he is going to be forcibly propelled forward.

“So what is it with you, I’ve always wanted to know?” Tord said looking at him curiously. “Sometimes I felt like we almost had something and the next you were walling me off.”

Tom shrugged.

“I am a very hot and cold man, Tom, I do well in extremes but you’ve always been nothing. Closed doors,” Tord reaches out and Tom finds a hand on his shoulder and the first major crack in whatever masquerade he is trying to force himself through to make it out of this room in one piece is rapidly dissolving.

“I- just want to do right for you,” Tom finally allows himself to admit and Tord ends the gap as their lips meet and Tom’s conscience is screaming bloody murder as everything he worked so hard to distance himself from, to restrain himself from, goes up in smoke.

Tord gets his way because of course he does.

Their lips meet and Tord’s hands are on his tie and then his tie is off him and before Tom can realize it his wrists are behind him.

“Always one for control, eh?” He says, quirking an eyebrow at Tord who looks him over appraisingly.

“I am a rather cagey man, indulge my paranoia,” Tord says as he stalks nearer. Tom can feel the light spark of nerves tingle up his back as Tord draws in close, so close, the heat of his body, the curl of his lips as he looks down at Tom tauntingly.

“To think I would have you here, eating out of my hand willingly,” Tord purrs and the deep set satisfaction in his tone is something that Tom finds himself caught off guard by. 

“I put up a hell of a fight in getting here,” Tom says, at least a mite bit defensively.

“That you did, but you are here nonetheless,” Tord says and within moments Tom is finding himself devested and Tord himself still fully clothed.

At his curious glance Tord smiles, “I have a meeting afterwards, let’s keep this neat.”

Admittedly, it is not neat. There is an ugly sort of truth to Tom coming apart at the seams and Tord’s touches do exactly that as he preps him. They cut the fine threads of his very being until Tom finds noises slipping out his mouth. He swallows the next one down in his embarrassment, but a skilled strategist knows his advantage and Tord certainly pushes it.

Withdrawing his fingers Tord pushes the edge of himself in, just the tip before pausing. Another untamped whimper escapes Tom.

Tord starts to bite him, suck him, scratch him, hard nails leaving raised tracks as they scrape their way down his back. He can’t say, in all honesty, he enjoys the physical pain. But he enjoys the mental ache that is soothed by the rough treatment.

The voice that says he belongs there, he deserves this and nothing else, that alone is sated. And he gets a grim sort of satisfaction knowing that there is absolutely no sustenance for Tord here in the long run. He can dote the fallows of scorched earth as long as he likes, no fruit will come from this here where Tord is choking him with no air, putting a glass over an already dying flame just to watch the blue smoke crowd and gather faster.

He pushes in and with that Tom’s spine feels like it’s dissolving, he finds himself being propped up by Tord moreso than anything else as something fills him and the heady rush of sensation has him pliant and noisy and wanting for Tord to do whatever he pleases.

This unwittingly starts Tom’s decline from secretary to lap dog. He would love to say otherwise but it is a grandiose delusion to claim that he was much else. His tasks included all his regular duties but instead of returning to his own quarters at the end of the day he finds himself going to Tord’s.

He proceeds to do an entirely different set of duties there, most of which involve him laying on his back or kneeling about waist high.

Word gets around and what little esteem or respect he had quickly evaporates and Tom is sure that would be extremely problematic if he weren’t glued to Tord’s side all the time. Seriously.

He thinks the longest time they are apart is the half hour Tom takes to do his morning routine, and even then, more often than not Tord likes to crash his showers and turn it into the kind of event that requires another shower before exiting.

It gets sickeningly sweet as well. He can hear a voice in his head sending of warning alarms at how close they are getting but still he finds himself holding Tord’s hand when they are alone together and falling into slow passionate kisses. 

A small, idealistic part of him wants to believe this is almost love.

Then? A switch up to the pace. Tom gets access. More and more privileges as he worms himself closer and closer to Tord and he finds himself taking advantage. Worming his way through the intestines of the base exploring now exposed nooks and crannies only to find himself face to face with that old friend that had slipped out of his mind so easily, like sand through a colander.

“Tom?”

Edd.

**Author's Note:**

> TBC obviously


End file.
